Natuurmonumenten.nl (Nature Reserves)

User experience is all about nature and user friendliness at Natuurmonumenten.nl

In September 2012 the new Natuurmonumenten.nl website went live. The website was completely rebuilt with a clear focus on user friendliness and the ability to experience the website from everywhere using mobile phones and tablets. The result is a website which is fully aligned with the newly developed communications strategy aimed at more involvement with the audience.

Why Drupal was chosen:

Natuurmonumenten has a history of working with Drupal. Previous site was a Drupal 6 with Organic Groups. They love the flexibility of the platform and wanted to continue to use their in-house knowledge of Drupal to push the boundaries of D7 in their new website.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

Business Background

The new Natuurmonumenten website aspires to increase public awareness about nature. It encourages visitors to discover natural areas and activities and it motivates going out and explore new outdoor experiences. By involving the audience more into nature, the website also aims to increase public donations and voluntary work as well as taking part in area-specific communities.

Technical Goals

The website content revolves around themes such as natural areas, seasons and various activities that all have found their way into the website’s visual design. Website visitors can upload photos for photo competitions that are featured inside the members magazine. The editors will select a photo every month which will be spotlighted on the website. Other submissions will be archived for future reference or put on the Facebook page.

Page Manager, Panels and Panelizer allow the content editors page-specific administration based on one template with the option to make derivatives.
Display Suite, in and of itself, reduces the number of Drupal template files. Apache Solr and FacetAPI are the fast and de facto search modules, based on performance and quality. Fieldable Panel Panes enables content editors to create call-to-actions and stand alone info blocks, without the overhead of nodes or content types. All used modules have ability to do proper versioning. Core Block was not used because of the need for flexibility in placing blocks everywhere.

Community contributions:

Natuurmonumenten.nl was the ultimate test case in the release of Display Suite 2.0.